Ed Kohler’s Techdirt Profile

About Ed Kohler

I'm a web strategist currently working within the real estate industry creating large scale web marketing platforms for use by real estate agents and brokers. Previous to this, I ran a web marketing consulting firm that offered SEO and pay per click services to small businesses. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota and travel continuously throughout the United States and Canada for work. I have given at least 100 public presentations over the past few years.

Ed Kohler’s Comments

It's not surprising that a game company knows how to game their ratings. But, they're far from alone in using this tactic. It's also used for gaming Yelp and other review directories by sending up follow-up surveys where positive responders are asked to publish their comments at sites like Yelp while the others are thanks for their feedback (and hopefully given follow-up about their less than idea experience).

The easy way to avoid over-delivery without having any negative impact on small businesses would be to switch to an opt-in system. That way, people who really plan to use the books would receive them and the rest of us wouldn't have to waste our time and tax dollars cleaning up the yellow pages industry's litter.

Using Google Analytics or pretty much any stats program or log file analyzer, a motivated web analyst can tie the query to the IP address, geolocation, browser type, computer OS, etc. It does narrow things down quite a bit when the query volume is narrow. For advertising purposes, people don't need that level of specificity, but the tools definitely provide for it.

One scene where execution gets a nod in the film was when Zuckerberg tears into his CFO for freezing the bank account. He explains that Facebook never goes down, which is one of the factors that is contributing to its success.

Mike, this is an excellent post that PR people and the people they represent should take very seriously. They're losing in the court of public opinion if they take conversations offline rather than responding with authentic, rational arguments to the points raised by reasonable bloggers like yourself.